“Has pop burnt itself out? Paul Morley, author of the acclaimed memoir
Nothing, takes the reader on an epic drive through the history of music to
find out. The drive is inspired by the video for Kylie Minogue’s hit single
‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’; it’s as if Kylie is driving towards a
virtual city built of sound & ideas.

A succession of celebrities, geniuses and other protagonists led by Madonna,
Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Erik Satie, John Cage & Wittgenstein appear in Kylie’s
car to give their points of view. Detours & sights along the way include
Missy Elliott, Jarvis Cocker, Eminem, Human League, Radiohead, Lou Reed,
Now! That’s What I Call Music, Ornette Coleman and the ghost of Elvis
Presley.

It’s a journey bridging the various paradoxes of twenty-first-century
culture; the avant-garde and pop, the iconic and the obscure, the mechanical
and the digital, the commercial and the creative, the human and the robotic.
It starts & ends with a man alone in a room with a song”.

“It’s a story full of lists. Some day music will only be air. There will be
no objects to hold or fetishise and people will simply collect lists. No
disc, nothing spooled or grooved, no heads to clean, no dust to wipe, no
compulsive alphabetising. Nothing to put away in shoeboxes or spare
cupboards and be embarrassed about. A chip inside us and inside the chip a
route to all the music that there ever was, which we can compile and
organise and reorganise and merge with and feel into and in whatever way
possible find the time to listen to, and we’ll need the time, all the time
there is, all the time that music finds to press itself into”.

File Under Popular Music (1) – 100 Greatest Albums of All Time

… in this suspicious order compiled one morning in January 2001 because an
Australian magazine called File Under Popular Music asked me to.

… a fourth list of the 100 or more who’s counting greatest albums of all
time off the top of my head on a live radio interview with a radio station
that seemed to be twelve hours ahead or behind the time zone I was in.

88 Albums - If You Think Radiohead’s Kid A is Weird, Then You Should Really
Hunt This Music Down

“After you have listened to at least twenty-two of the following, then
perhaps you can begin a discussion, with Kylie or her ghostwriter, about
just what makes music weird, and then – after the weirdness – what happens,
what changes, what goes on, what’s the point – is it just a pleasure
listening to weirdness that is just straightforward pleasure, or is the
weirdness making the world, you mind, your mind in the world, a better place
thing space capsule container mind room, etc… ?”

There is an order to the following – the order that it comes in, which I
thought about short and hard. I was delighted with the order. It worked
perfectly…